If you thought that your chats on Facebook were private, think again.

The Silicon Valley tech giant, which views its users only as collectors of data to be sold to third parties, was caught doing just that, according to a Tuesday New York Times report.

“Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages,” the report said.

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Despite Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s April testimony to Congress that Facebook had implemented strict privacy protections for its users, it continued to allow third party applications to access the data of those same users.

“In all, the deals described in the documents benefited more than 150 companies — most of them tech businesses, including online retailers and entertainment sites, but also automakers and media organizations,” the report said. “Their applications sought the data of hundreds of millions of people a month, the records show. The deals, the oldest of which date to 2010, were all active in 2017. Some were still in effect this year.”

Facebook has been embroiled in privacy scandals for the past two years. Just last week, Big League Politics reported that Facebook leaked millions its users’ of photos to third parties. In April, Facebook faced a huge amount of backlash after the public found out that 87 million accounts had been compromised by Cambridge Analytica, a data mining firm.

In 2015, the tech giant faced a similar scandal when third party applications downloaded by a users were sucking data from that user’s Facebook friends.

Follow Peter D’Abrosca on Twitter: @pdabrosca

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